If you think that SWTOR has game engine problems using a heavily-customized version of the Hero Engine, then you should see the complete train wreck that it would have been if they used an uncustomized version of the Hero Engine.
Game engines are designed to do particular things. If what you want to do is something that the game engine is designed to handle, great. But as soon as you want to do something that the game engine designers didn't anticipate, you've basically got three options: modify the game engine, find some roundabout way of cramming it into the game engine, or abandon that idea.
If you've got your own game engine, you take option 1 and don't think much of it. If you're using an off-the-shelf game engine, option 1 is not available to you. Option 2 is sometimes unavailable to you, and is likely to carry a large performance hit even if you can do it. It's nearly guaranteed to be more work than option 1 would have been. If you're using an off-the-shelf game engine, then get used to taking option 3: abandoning most of your creative ideas because they don't fit the game engine.
There seems to be this mystique that game engines are really hard to create. They're not. You do need a competent programmer with a decent background in mathematics (linear algebra is critical for anything 3D, and multivariable calculus is important, too). But you'll need that in order to make a bunch of other things in your game work, too. Trying to license a game engine as a way to get around needing to have anyone competent working on your project isn't likely to end well.
The point is for small projects, not the fact that SWTOR used a modified version of hero. I code myself, and I understand the merits of writing your own code to do exactly what you want/need it to do.
However I completely disagree with you on it being easy to write your own 3D game engine, especially for a small indy dev team. Besides the whole 3D world, lighting, sound and physics, there's netcode, weather, APIs and many other systems that would need to be put in from scratch. If making a good 3D engine was easy, the market wouldn't need engines like Hero, Unity, Unreal, iD Tech, Source, etc. Indy projects like Greed Monger and The Repopulation are using someone else's engine for a reason, and a lot of higher-end 3D games are licensing engines from companies that already did most of the hard work.
Have you tried it? I have. And I'm telling you, it's a lot easier than I expected, though you do need a strong math background for it, which is something that most programmers don't have. But then, you'll need a strong math background to do a lot of other things well. A game engine won't automatically play balance skills for you, and relying on reading forum whining won't get the job done, either.
I haven't done sound or networking code yet, though Java has built-in capabilities that I'll use. At the moment, I'm taking the view that if everyone and his neighbor's dog could do sound a decade ago, then I can probably figure out how to do it today. Meanwhile, the networking code absolutely must be customized to fit the exact data your game needs to send and take into account how time-sensitive various things are or else it will be terrible.
As for 3D APIs, you use either Direct3D or else OpenGL. It takes a few weeks to learn either one, but most of the graphical things that games commonly do that seem like they should be hard are handled automatically by the API.
Now, if it's a really small project where you're trying to make a game on a $10,000 budget, then yeah, you want to license a game engine rather than creating your own. But if you've got a $1 million budget, it doesn't cost that much to have one person spend a few months to create a 3D graphics engine that does exactly what you want it to do.
If you think that SWTOR has game engine problems using a heavily-customized version of the Hero Engine, then you should see the complete train wreck that it would have been if they used an uncustomized version of the Hero Engine.
Game engines are designed to do particular things. If what you want to do is something that the game engine is designed to handle, great. But as soon as you want to do something that the game engine designers didn't anticipate, you've basically got three options: modify the game engine, find some roundabout way of cramming it into the game engine, or abandon that idea.
If you've got your own game engine, you take option 1 and don't think much of it. If you're using an off-the-shelf game engine, option 1 is not available to you. Option 2 is sometimes unavailable to you, and is likely to carry a large performance hit even if you can do it. It's nearly guaranteed to be more work than option 1 would have been. If you're using an off-the-shelf game engine, then get used to taking option 3: abandoning most of your creative ideas because they don't fit the game engine.
There seems to be this mystique that game engines are really hard to create. They're not. You do need a competent programmer with a decent background in mathematics (linear algebra is critical for anything 3D, and multivariable calculus is important, too). But you'll need that in order to make a bunch of other things in your game work, too. Trying to license a game engine as a way to get around needing to have anyone competent working on your project isn't likely to end well.
The point is for small projects, not the fact that SWTOR used a modified version of hero. I code myself, and I understand the merits of writing your own code to do exactly what you want/need it to do.
However I completely disagree with you on it being easy to write your own 3D game engine, especially for a small indy dev team. Besides the whole 3D world, lighting, sound and physics, there's netcode, weather, APIs and many other systems that would need to be put in from scratch. If making a good 3D engine was easy, the market wouldn't need engines like Hero, Unity, Unreal, iD Tech, Source, etc. Indy projects like Greed Monger and The Repopulation are using someone else's engine for a reason, and a lot of higher-end 3D games are licensing engines from companies that already did most of the hard work.
you need buy a proprietary license and get full access to source code if you want to use a 3rd part engine to make something like a 3d open world mmorpgs (i think this is what the "against" side in this argument is basically trying to say).
serious developers dont use the hobby versions of these engines because
If you think that SWTOR has game engine problems using a heavily-customized version of the Hero Engine, then you should see the complete train wreck that it would have been if they used an uncustomized version of the Hero Engine.
Game engines are designed to do particular things. If what you want to do is something that the game engine is designed to handle, great. But as soon as you want to do something that the game engine designers didn't anticipate, you've basically got three options: modify the game engine, find some roundabout way of cramming it into the game engine, or abandon that idea.
If you've got your own game engine, you take option 1 and don't think much of it. If you're using an off-the-shelf game engine, option 1 is not available to you. Option 2 is sometimes unavailable to you, and is likely to carry a large performance hit even if you can do it. It's nearly guaranteed to be more work than option 1 would have been. If you're using an off-the-shelf game engine, then get used to taking option 3: abandoning most of your creative ideas because they don't fit the game engine.
There seems to be this mystique that game engines are really hard to create. They're not. You do need a competent programmer with a decent background in mathematics (linear algebra is critical for anything 3D, and multivariable calculus is important, too). But you'll need that in order to make a bunch of other things in your game work, too. Trying to license a game engine as a way to get around needing to have anyone competent working on your project isn't likely to end well.
The point is for small projects, not the fact that SWTOR used a modified version of hero. I code myself, and I understand the merits of writing your own code to do exactly what you want/need it to do.
However I completely disagree with you on it being easy to write your own 3D game engine, especially for a small indy dev team. Besides the whole 3D world, lighting, sound and physics, there's netcode, weather, APIs and many other systems that would need to be put in from scratch. If making a good 3D engine was easy, the market wouldn't need engines like Hero, Unity, Unreal, iD Tech, Source, etc. Indy projects like Greed Monger and The Repopulation are using someone else's engine for a reason, and a lot of higher-end 3D games are licensing engines from companies that already did most of the hard work.
you need buy a proprietary license and get full access to source code if you want to use a 3rd part engine to make something like a 3d open world mmorpgs (i think this is what the "against" side in this argument is basically trying to say).
serious developers dont use the hobby versions of these engines because
1. they dont give the developer much control
2. ~30% of your profits is way too expensive
It's not too expensive if you are *never* going to secure the $1 million+ and a couple years it may take to write your own engine, which will not even come close to Hero or Unity's capability. For all intents and purposes, using Hero Cloud is a type of investment in your company, and for that investment, they are getting paid a percentage. If you can't afford to hire enough people to build an engine from scratch in the time it would take, you are pretty much dead in the water before you even get started. If you secure real investment, they might end up owning at least 30% of your business, and often times investment comes at the price of giving up majority ownership and control of your business
I've never used Hero Engine, but I have seen what some other devs are doing with it, such as The Repopulation, and it looks pretty damned good to me. The Repopulation probably wouldn't even exist if they didn't have the option of licensing a turnkey engine, nor would Greed Monger or other projects. This discussion wasn't about whether or not Hero Engine is the best choice for all projects. It was about a great tool being available to get *INDY DEVELOPERS* started in game development for a very low cost of entry.
Let us also not forget that if I get Hero Engine for $99 and I walk away from my project before it's even done, for whatever reason, I'm only out my time plus $99. Try that with traditional investment. I haven't looked at their contract, but I imagine the fate of a finished game that fails at launch doesn't put you in the poor house either.
I'm not a fan of pharmaceutical anti-depressants, but I'm starting to think a lot of people around here could benefit from them. Seriously.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
It's not too expensive if you are *never* going to secure the $1 million+ and a couple years it may take to write your own engine, which will not even come close to Hero or Unity's capability.
Hooray for completely made up numbers that sound scary?
If you make your own game engine, you don't need for it to match everything that the Hero or Unity engines can do. You only need for it to be able to do the things that you want to do in your particular game. You don't have to try to think of everything that everyone could conceivably ever want to do in any game and implement all of that.
If you think that SWTOR has game engine problems using a heavily-customized version of the Hero Engine, then you should see the complete train wreck that it would have been if they used an uncustomized version of the Hero Engine.
Game engines are designed to do particular things. If what you want to do is something that the game engine is designed to handle, great. But as soon as you want to do something that the game engine designers didn't anticipate, you've basically got three options: modify the game engine, find some roundabout way of cramming it into the game engine, or abandon that idea.
If you've got your own game engine, you take option 1 and don't think much of it. If you're using an off-the-shelf game engine, option 1 is not available to you. Option 2 is sometimes unavailable to you, and is likely to carry a large performance hit even if you can do it. It's nearly guaranteed to be more work than option 1 would have been. If you're using an off-the-shelf game engine, then get used to taking option 3: abandoning most of your creative ideas because they don't fit the game engine.
There seems to be this mystique that game engines are really hard to create. They're not. You do need a competent programmer with a decent background in mathematics (linear algebra is critical for anything 3D, and multivariable calculus is important, too). But you'll need that in order to make a bunch of other things in your game work, too. Trying to license a game engine as a way to get around needing to have anyone competent working on your project isn't likely to end well.
The point is for small projects, not the fact that SWTOR used a modified version of hero. I code myself, and I understand the merits of writing your own code to do exactly what you want/need it to do.
However I completely disagree with you on it being easy to write your own 3D game engine, especially for a small indy dev team. Besides the whole 3D world, lighting, sound and physics, there's netcode, weather, APIs and many other systems that would need to be put in from scratch. If making a good 3D engine was easy, the market wouldn't need engines like Hero, Unity, Unreal, iD Tech, Source, etc. Indy projects like Greed Monger and The Repopulation are using someone else's engine for a reason, and a lot of higher-end 3D games are licensing engines from companies that already did most of the hard work.
you need buy a proprietary license and get full access to source code if you want to use a 3rd part engine to make something like a 3d open world mmorpgs (i think this is what the "against" side in this argument is basically trying to say).
serious developers dont use the hobby versions of these engines because
1. they dont give the developer much control
2. ~30% of your profits is way too expensive
It's not too expensive if you are *never* going to secure the $1 million+ and a couple years it may take to write your own engine, which will not even come close to Hero or Unity's capability. For all intents and purposes, using Hero Cloud is a type of investment in your company, and for that investment, they are getting paid a percentage. If you can't afford to hire enough people to build an engine from scratch in the time it would take, you are pretty much dead in the water before you even get started. If you secure real investment, they might end up owning at least 30% of your business, and often times investment comes at the price of giving up majority ownership and control of your business
I've never used Hero Engine, but I have seen what some other devs are doing with it, such as The Repopulation, and it looks pretty damned good to me. The Repopulation probably wouldn't even exist if they didn't have the option of licensing a turnkey engine, nor would Greed Monger or other projects. This discussion wasn't about whether or not Hero Engine is the best choice for all projects. It was about a great tool being available to get *INDY DEVELOPERS* started in game development for a very low cost of entry.
Let us also not forget that if I get Hero Engine for $99 and I walk away from my project before it's even done, for whatever reason, I'm only out my time plus $99. Try that with traditional investment. I haven't looked at their contract, but I imagine the fate of a finished game that fails at launch doesn't put you in the poor house either.
I'm not a fan of pharmaceutical anti-depressants, but I'm starting to think a lot of people around here could benefit from them. Seriously.
is repopulation using the hobby version of hero engine (herocloud) or the did they buy a license with access to source code etc?
source code access is $75k + 7% revenue. im guess repopulation went with this option. any developer which is actually serious about what they are doing will go with this option. herocloud is a toy.
Originally posted by Souldrainer There are some good things that this engine brings to the table, like stable network management. However, if you are an indie dev who has fewer than 10 games under your belt, I strongly advise you to avoid RPGs and MMOs until you have a good grasp on the fundamentals of game design.
This doesn't matter at all.
WoW was Blizzard's first MMO. It did very well.
SWTOr was BioWare's first MMO. It did very bad.
It's all about knowing what makes a good MMO. BioWare claimed it was story. Nope.
There's more to having commercial success than having a good product. Yes, it does help, but that in itself does not guarantee its success.
Originally posted by Souldrainer There are some good things that this engine brings to the table, like stable network management. However, if you are an indie dev who has fewer than 10 games under your belt, I strongly advise you to avoid RPGs and MMOs until you have a good grasp on the fundamentals of game design.
This doesn't matter at all.
WoW was Blizzard's first MMO. It did very well.
SWTOr was BioWare's first MMO. It did very bad.
It's all about knowing what makes a good MMO. BioWare claimed it was story. Nope.
There's more to having commercial success than having a good product. Yes, it does help, but that in itself does not guarantee its success.
mmoDAD ccompletely missed the part where blizzard has lots of experience with massive multiplayer with bnet and bioware has none and both companies have made other non mmorpg games. souldrainers advice is pretty good. i reckon you could subsitute 10 small indie games as he suggested with 1 succesful multiplayer indie game that people actually play. point is that you need skills/experience/money to make an mmorpg and until you acquire this you probs shouldnt bother. make a simple multiplayer game first-- see if you can do that.
An MMORPG as your very first project is probably a bad idea, unless it's awfully simple. But ten other games first? Why ten? Does ten really give you that much more critical experience as compared to nine?
Wow I never witness so much vemon spewing forth at someone that is just trying to ask if herocloud would be a good start for new or small indie teams to tinker with. We're not talking about the next UO here. I personally think it's fine to dabble in while moving from the concept phase to the materialize stage. It would allow you to test your fortitude while keeping your finacial well being safe. I look at this as a way for new ideas to surface just like XNA was to console gamers for indies. No harm in that. HeroCloud is nothing more to MMOs than XNA was to consoles. Which maybe a good thing to humble a lot of the people around here that keep thinking they can do better. Some may and many will not.
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
Originally posted by Ramonski7 Wow I never witness so much vemon spewing forth at someone that is just trying to ask if herocloud would be a good start for new or small indie teams to tinker with. We're not talking about the next UO here. I personally think it's fine to dabble in while moving from the concept phase to the materialize stage. It would allow you to test your fortitude while keeping your finacial well being safe. I look at this as a way for new ideas to surface just like XNA was to console gamers for indies. No harm in that. HeroCloud is nothing more to MMOs than XNA was to consoles. Which maybe a good thing to humble a lot of the people around here that keep thinking they can do better. Some may and many will not.
read thread again. i dont think anyone here has been even slightly rude to OP. a lot of people here dont seem to appreciate the engineering side of video games and the dont understand how important it is. multiplayer is a huge challenge and massively multiplayer is even harder. herocloud is fine for getting your feet wet but if you want to make actually make a massively multiplayer game and make money from it i would look elsewhere.
But both can be done with herocloud. Like I stated before, I don't think anyone here is looking to create a masterpiece here. And I know the OP is not looking to replace is income here. I just think instead of detracting from the small goals he has listed, maybe some of the more tech savvy members here could give some words of encouragement. But I now understand that's like asking people here for a kidney when all you asked for was a light.
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
Hmm... while some of the more experienced people around here who are against the use of premade engines, are offering some valuable insight and information.
I still think that the spirit in which the OP is presentingthem is still valid and good. The premade engnes are a good start of the new people to get in to making a game. Not everyone can start coding their own engine just like that. And not everyone can make a game and grasp many of the notions that are involved. But everyone can learn and premade engines are a good way to learn in my opinion.
So unless some here have somethng to fear, i do not think that discouraging people from getting their feet wet with these engines which at 99$/year are a very affordable endeavor, is actually a good thing.
Many players have much better ideas than existing Devs (mainly due to constrtraints imposed on them by the industry), which these engines could help some to express without those constraints. It can only be good for the industry and I do not hink that there is anything to fear of.
I say anyone who ever wanted to put some of their Ideas to the test, go for it, pick one of these engines and let your creative juices guide you!
- Duke Suraknar - Order of the Silver Star, OSS
ESKA, Playing MMORPG's since Ultima Online 1997 - Order of the Silver Serpent, Atlantic Shard
Tell the guys Developing the Repopulation all this crap and see what they say considering they are using Hero... I personally have a HeroEngine Server - I'll tell you one thing it's NOT designed for people with no Programming Experience. There's a TON of Programming you have to do. And it runs great on my old Single Core CPU with Integrated Graphics so I have no idea where people get that it doesn't perform well.
I have researched quite a few game engines because i am currently looking into making my own casual multiplayer game. hero engine is basically a toy to play around with for people who arent really serious about making games for money.
high quality large scale mmorpgs/games do not work well with one solution fits all stuff like hero engine. im sorry but thats the way it is.
hero engine uses some weird hero script which probably doesnt give the developer much control over anything and it probably runs slow as shit.
the whole hero cloud server crap is bullshit. no decent mmorpg or online game will run on servers which they have little control over.
if the developer doesnt have control over server-client interaction and the mulitplayer code, developer cannot guarantee stability, no hacks , no lag etcc etc
if you want to make a big huge mmorpg, you probably cant . stop dreaming.... you would need to build your own complex game engine or pay $500k-$1000k for a proprietary game engine which you would then heavily modify...
if you are making a smaller game make your own primittive game engine or use unity3d
mmorpgs are a big thing and you need large amounts of capital, experience, skills and manpower to make them.
Tell that to the people making The Repopulation.
The HeroEngine and the HeroCloud is the perfect solution for an indie company wanting to create an MMO or some other online game. Heroscript is the way for people using heroengine to code in new things or manipulate the engine in different ways.. its just a different scripting language.. UDK also uses their own scriping language as well as many other game engines. You can also gain access to the source code for the hero engine via other license models.
As for making an MMO yes your right its a lot of work but HeroEngine does cut down that work quite a bit.. work that you would have to do if you where gonig to use Unity3d..
Unity is a nice engine as well, now with DX11 support as well but it is in no way setup to support MMOs and you have to do a lot of work to get it even close to being ready for an MMO.. you will also need to use middleware for the networking code.
Most people put the hero engine down because of SWTOR.. Bioware used an old version of the engine and managed to mash it up bad as well..
At the end of the day HeroEngine is a very viable option for any indie company wanting to make an MMO. its also one of the best engines for multiple people working togeather, I have not seen it done better in any engine.
Saying that no one should try and make an MMO game as their first game, there is a shit ton of work invovled and a lot of things can go wrong.. best to make a few SP games and maybe a few small MP games first
Didnt realsie they had released HeroEngine 2 think ill have to take another look at it
Unity3D IS another option with the right Network Middleware (MuchDifferent's uLink) it's a very viable option. That's what the team I'm on is using. We are programming our own "inhouse" framework complete with custom Editors, Seamless Tech, our own Character Customization Tech, and plenty as of yet unreleased Cutting edge tech not found in any Current MMO.
Originally posted by JamesP Tell the guys Developing the Repopulation all this crap and see what they say considering they are using Hero... I personally have a HeroEngine Server - I'll tell you one thing it's NOT designed for people with no Programming Experience. There's a TON of Programming you have to do. And it runs great on my old Single Core CPU with Integrated Graphics so I have no idea where people get that it doesn't perform well.
Frame rate isn't just a function of the game engine. It depends tremendously on how much you're trying to keep track of and have to draw per frame, and on what you're trying to draw. The first time I ran my game engine, it ran at about 200 frames per second on my AMD E-350 based laptop/netbook, even though it was horribly unoptimized. It helped that the only thing it was trying to draw was a test pattern on the ground. Getting 50 frames per second while drawing 20 times as much means I've made huge improvements in efficiency, even though the frame rate went way down.
Now, you probably already knew that. But that's a point I was trying to make earlier in the thread, where someone was complaining that the Hero Engine is what forces SWTOR to limit how much it draws on the screen at once, as though some other game engine could draw arbitrarily large amounts of things without any performance problems. While there are surely some game engines that are more efficient than others, it's not an easy thing to measure, especially considering that the relevant comparison is after you've made all of your optimizations to each.
The trick is, there is only so much blood you can sqeeze from a turnip. Also, if you don't have access to the code for the engine, at that price, that is where people make optimizations.
The HeroEngine and the HeroCloud is the perfect solution for an indie company wanting to create an MMO or some other online game. Heroscript is the way for people using heroengine to code in new things or manipulate the engine in different ways.. its just a different scripting language.. UDK also uses their own scriping language as well as many other game engines. You can also gain access to the source code for the hero engine via other license models.
As for making an MMO yes your right its a lot of work but HeroEngine does cut down that work quite a bit.. work that you would have to do if you where gonig to use Unity3d..
Unity is a nice engine as well, now with DX11 support as well but it is in no way setup to support MMOs and you have to do a lot of work to get it even close to being ready for an MMO.. you will also need to use middleware for the networking code.
Does DirectX 11 even matter if you're not using tessellation? And how could one plausibly hope to do tessellation without writing your own shaders? That's low-level stuff that an off-the-shelf game engine isn't going to give you access to without the full source code.
Having worked with Hero Engine for about a year and a half now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the thing. It's renderer isn't on par with the likes of Unreal Tech, but the editors, collaberative editing, networking is all just fine.
The HeroEngine and the HeroCloud is the perfect solution for an indie company wanting to create an MMO or some other online game. Heroscript is the way for people using heroengine to code in new things or manipulate the engine in different ways.. its just a different scripting language.. UDK also uses their own scriping language as well as many other game engines. You can also gain access to the source code for the hero engine via other license models.
As for making an MMO yes your right its a lot of work but HeroEngine does cut down that work quite a bit.. work that you would have to do if you where gonig to use Unity3d..
Unity is a nice engine as well, now with DX11 support as well but it is in no way setup to support MMOs and you have to do a lot of work to get it even close to being ready for an MMO.. you will also need to use middleware for the networking code.
Does DirectX 11 even matter if you're not using tessellation? And how could one plausibly hope to do tessellation without writing your own shaders? That's low-level stuff that an off-the-shelf game engine isn't going to give you access to without the full source code.
There are plugins available for Unity3d that allow you to create your own shaders..
Check this webdemo of a some very nice terrain shaders.. i picked this up last night.
It's not too expensive if you are *never* going to secure the $1 million+ and a couple years it may take to write your own engine, which will not even come close to Hero or Unity's capability.
Hooray for completely made up numbers that sound scary?
If you make your own game engine, you don't need for it to match everything that the Hero or Unity engines can do. You only need for it to be able to do the things that you want to do in your particular game. You don't have to try to think of everything that everyone could conceivably ever want to do in any game and implement all of that.
It doesn't matter if the number is made up. If you want to write your own engine, go for it. Almost everything I have ever read from developers about writing great 3D game engines from the ground up, is that it's a monumental undertaking. I'm really not sure what your point is here. You seem to believe that everyone is better off writing their own engine rather than licensing one, which is clearly *not true* for a lot of companies, especially indy developers who don't have the resources of a fully funded game company.
So where is your robust 3D MMO engine? I'd like to take a look at it since you fancy yourself an expert.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
The HeroEngine and the HeroCloud is the perfect solution for an indie company wanting to create an MMO or some other online game. Heroscript is the way for people using heroengine to code in new things or manipulate the engine in different ways.. its just a different scripting language.. UDK also uses their own scriping language as well as many other game engines. You can also gain access to the source code for the hero engine via other license models.
As for making an MMO yes your right its a lot of work but HeroEngine does cut down that work quite a bit.. work that you would have to do if you where gonig to use Unity3d..
Unity is a nice engine as well, now with DX11 support as well but it is in no way setup to support MMOs and you have to do a lot of work to get it even close to being ready for an MMO.. you will also need to use middleware for the networking code.
Does DirectX 11 even matter if you're not using tessellation? And how could one plausibly hope to do tessellation without writing your own shaders? That's low-level stuff that an off-the-shelf game engine isn't going to give you access to without the full source code.
There are plugins available for Unity3d that allow you to create your own shaders..
Check this webdemo of a some very nice terrain shaders.. i picked this up last night.
They start by saying there are two kinds of shaders. Well, there are two kinds of shaders that the Hero Engine will let you use. There are actually six kinds of shaders, but the Hero Engine won't let you touch hull, domain, geometry, or compute shaders. That's presumably simply because they're limited to DirectX 9.0c. But still, that means modern 3D graphics is off-limits.
I'm guessing that their list of "variables" allowed is the DirectX equivalent of OpenGL uniforms. If they're actually the equivalent of OpenGL variables, then egad, that's useless. But if they only allow certain ones--and artificially make a lot of types off-limits, then that seems awfully restrictive. I suppose that you could probably repurpose some for things that have nothing to do with the variable name, but that's something of a kludge and having variable names that have nothing to do with the meaning or purpose of the variable is rather than opposite of good coding practices.
As for the Unity Engine, here's what they have to say:
They still offer the basic vertex and fragment shaders, though I'm not sure what amount of customizability they give you there. They also offer surface shaders, which are supposed to be more customizable and allow tessellation. Here's what they say about surface shaders:
They seem to focus mostly on how to compute the tessellation degree. In OpenGL, the work there would mostly be done in vertex shaders; I'm guessing that it's the same for DirectX.
They give examples, but not explicit, so I have no idea if you can do much with it. They compute the tessellation degree by calling a function without showing you the function, so I have no idea what the function does. They talk about making the tessellation depend on distance or edge length, but not curvature or boundary status, and you'll be completely crippled if you can't make it depend on those last two. Not being able to use curvature just means that you'll sometimes have to tessellate a lot more than necessary in some places in order to get adequate tessellation in others, which means your code will be poorly-optimized.
Having nothing at all about a boundary is far more problematic, as that means you can't attach tessellated surfaces to each other. That means you can't use tessellation to do anything complex unless you tessellate the whole thing in one go, which would be a nightmare to set up. That would make things much harder than necessary, which defeats the point of licensing a game engine. Well, the alternative is to just accept that you're going to have a lot of graphical artifacting when different surfaces tessellate a common boundary differently, but that's also undesirable.
I also don't see an explicit homeomorphism between the simplicial manifold with boundary given in the vertex data and the manifold with boundary that you're actually trying to draw. (Well, there's no hard rule that they have to be manifolds, but that will usually make your life easier.) It looks like they're relying on a texture for that, and the texture isn't explicitly given. For irregular shapes like faces, that's kind of what you have to do. But if you want to draw a more regular shape like a sphere or cylinder? You could create a texture for it, but it's wildly inefficient.
And again, if you want to attach surfaces to each other along their boundaries to create more complex shapes, details in how texture filtering works will probably give you graphical artifacting. That's not a problem with how texture filtering works; it's a problem of using it for things that it isn't meant for.
Modern Graphics are not an issue for most gamers, anything on Par with WoW graphics, or Elderscrolls Online graphics or SWTOR graphics is more than sufficient for an MMO.
Moderns, tesselations and the such, are good for Single Player games. I do not want to be upgrading Computer every time a new MMO comes out.
And you would be making the same mistake as all of the MMO's who advertised "next generation" MMO did, limitiong your player base, creating frustration for people, and bad word of mouth from the onset of launch.
MMO's do not need latest graphics to be great. If you bargaining card is your latst Graphics then I know intuitivelly as a player based on previous experiences that you have no substance or good gameplay in your game. Or at least I know that i will not be having fun because I will be fighting with the performance issues instead of enjoying the gameplay, which comes down to not having a good gameplay anyways from a player's perspective.
What I want in MMO is a good representation of things not a realistic representation of things as to strike a balance between Gameplay and Performance without me having to upgrade to the latest OS (I hear Microsoft wants to offer DirectX 11.1 only on Windows 8) or Gear...forget it, too much hassle for most players. And I am not about to turn my PC in ot a Smartphone either with Windows 8...no way.
Just jumping in to give a perspective.
- Duke Suraknar - Order of the Silver Star, OSS
ESKA, Playing MMORPG's since Ultima Online 1997 - Order of the Silver Serpent, Atlantic Shard
I've read that and it basically confirms what I was saying: Bioware needed something fast and chose Hero Engine because it has impressive development tools (it does). There are limitations in the engine, especially the early build that they purchased, which explain a lot of the design decisions behind SWtOR though.
For example, the common criticism of SWtOR being nothing but a bunch of coridoors and rooms has to do with how the Hero Engine handles zones and terrain. Even their open world areas, like Tatooine and Alderan, simply use tricks to prevent the player from ever being able to see off very far in the distance. Stuff like "dog leg" shaped maps, and painted skyboxes for "distant terrain."
The engine now has what's called "seamless 2.0" which does make open world a bit more viable, in that you can link two zones together without using a transition piece, however it is still limited enough that you still have to design your grid of zones in such a way as to prevent the player from loading too many zones at one time.
Example: (zones named A, B, C, and D)
A B
C D
As you move from zone A to B, the engine knows it needs to start loading up zone B into memory, so that when you reach zone B, the transition is seamless to the player (who thinks they are just in the same open are).
If you move from zone A to D, the engine would end up having to load zones B, C, and D because you are potentially going to any of them (they are all in sight from the south east corner of zone A). This overhoad of loading additional zones up is very significant, and something the engine isn't designed for.
So from a game design standpoint, you'd have to take that limitation into consideration and setup your map so that something is in the middle of all four zones, such as a moutain or very large building, preventing the possibility of running into that situation.
This is not all that uncommon for game design anyway. You see it a lot in cities, where they are designed to be a big circle (Ironforge in WoW, Sanctuary in Rift, Human captial in GW2, etc).
Anyway, I only mentioned it because of the complaints people have of MMO's that aren't open-world enough. It often has to do with the game engine limitations. WoW used to have this problem, but was updated with Cata out of necessity.
No, if you read that, it confirms absolutely nothing of what you've spouted. The engine SWToR has couldn't even be called HeroEngine at the time they purchased it, it was loose and buggy bits of unoptimized code. By the time the HeroEngine was actually made, EAware had already butchered and cobbled the not-even-alpha code they purchased into a whole different monstrosity. Even further, as stated in that link ( make sure to read the comment section as well as the article, as the HeroEngine devs did give replies ), HeroEngine devs were eventually locked out of SWToR develoopment and when patches, updates, and fixes for HeroEngine were made, EAware got none of them by choice. EAware could have accepted help from the HeroEngine devs, but didn't.
Calling SWToR's engine HeroEngine is an insult and disgrace to the actual HeroEngine devs work. If it were me in charge of HeroEngine, I'd have demanded EAware to remove my product's name from theirs.
That's always going to happen when you fork the source code to customize things yourself. You change the way the game engine wants things structured to fit your game, and then any changes made to the "standard" version of the game engine assume the previous structure and don't fit your version of it. But you have to do it anyway unless you want the version you're using to be poorly optimized because the standard version can't customize things for every particular game.
Originally posted by JC-Smith Having worked with Hero Engine for about a year and a half now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the thing. It's renderer isn't on par with the likes of Unreal Tech, but the editors, collaberative editing, networking is all just fine.
you have to release your game to the public before you make this claim. no one expects a developer to criticise their own work publicly.
in terms of released games, hero engine doesnt really have a great history. no doubt it is easy to use, allows multiple people to work on the same thing at the same time in real time and has plenty of built in assets and networking but personally i would go about making an mmorpg using it. heck i wouldnt go about making an mmorpg as an indie unless it was something very simple (eg. 2d, turn based, text based or just plain simple)
Comments
Have you tried it? I have. And I'm telling you, it's a lot easier than I expected, though you do need a strong math background for it, which is something that most programmers don't have. But then, you'll need a strong math background to do a lot of other things well. A game engine won't automatically play balance skills for you, and relying on reading forum whining won't get the job done, either.
I haven't done sound or networking code yet, though Java has built-in capabilities that I'll use. At the moment, I'm taking the view that if everyone and his neighbor's dog could do sound a decade ago, then I can probably figure out how to do it today. Meanwhile, the networking code absolutely must be customized to fit the exact data your game needs to send and take into account how time-sensitive various things are or else it will be terrible.
As for 3D APIs, you use either Direct3D or else OpenGL. It takes a few weeks to learn either one, but most of the graphical things that games commonly do that seem like they should be hard are handled automatically by the API.
Now, if it's a really small project where you're trying to make a game on a $10,000 budget, then yeah, you want to license a game engine rather than creating your own. But if you've got a $1 million budget, it doesn't cost that much to have one person spend a few months to create a 3D graphics engine that does exactly what you want it to do.
you need buy a proprietary license and get full access to source code if you want to use a 3rd part engine to make something like a 3d open world mmorpgs (i think this is what the "against" side in this argument is basically trying to say).
serious developers dont use the hobby versions of these engines because
1. they dont give the developer much control
2. ~30% of your profits is way too expensive
It's not too expensive if you are *never* going to secure the $1 million+ and a couple years it may take to write your own engine, which will not even come close to Hero or Unity's capability. For all intents and purposes, using Hero Cloud is a type of investment in your company, and for that investment, they are getting paid a percentage. If you can't afford to hire enough people to build an engine from scratch in the time it would take, you are pretty much dead in the water before you even get started. If you secure real investment, they might end up owning at least 30% of your business, and often times investment comes at the price of giving up majority ownership and control of your business
I've never used Hero Engine, but I have seen what some other devs are doing with it, such as The Repopulation, and it looks pretty damned good to me. The Repopulation probably wouldn't even exist if they didn't have the option of licensing a turnkey engine, nor would Greed Monger or other projects. This discussion wasn't about whether or not Hero Engine is the best choice for all projects. It was about a great tool being available to get *INDY DEVELOPERS* started in game development for a very low cost of entry.
Let us also not forget that if I get Hero Engine for $99 and I walk away from my project before it's even done, for whatever reason, I'm only out my time plus $99. Try that with traditional investment. I haven't looked at their contract, but I imagine the fate of a finished game that fails at launch doesn't put you in the poor house either.
I'm not a fan of pharmaceutical anti-depressants, but I'm starting to think a lot of people around here could benefit from them. Seriously.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
Hooray for completely made up numbers that sound scary?
If you make your own game engine, you don't need for it to match everything that the Hero or Unity engines can do. You only need for it to be able to do the things that you want to do in your particular game. You don't have to try to think of everything that everyone could conceivably ever want to do in any game and implement all of that.
is repopulation using the hobby version of hero engine (herocloud) or the did they buy a license with access to source code etc?
http://www.heroengine.com/heroengine/licensing-options/
source code access is $75k + 7% revenue. im guess repopulation went with this option. any developer which is actually serious about what they are doing will go with this option. herocloud is a toy.
There's more to having commercial success than having a good product. Yes, it does help, but that in itself does not guarantee its success.
mmoDAD ccompletely missed the part where blizzard has lots of experience with massive multiplayer with bnet and bioware has none and both companies have made other non mmorpg games. souldrainers advice is pretty good. i reckon you could subsitute 10 small indie games as he suggested with 1 succesful multiplayer indie game that people actually play. point is that you need skills/experience/money to make an mmorpg and until you acquire this you probs shouldnt bother. make a simple multiplayer game first-- see if you can do that.
An MMORPG as your very first project is probably a bad idea, unless it's awfully simple. But ten other games first? Why ten? Does ten really give you that much more critical experience as compared to nine?
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
read thread again. i dont think anyone here has been even slightly rude to OP. a lot of people here dont seem to appreciate the engineering side of video games and the dont understand how important it is. multiplayer is a huge challenge and massively multiplayer is even harder. herocloud is fine for getting your feet wet but if you want to make actually make a massively multiplayer game and make money from it i would look elsewhere.
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
Hmm... while some of the more experienced people around here who are against the use of premade engines, are offering some valuable insight and information.
I still think that the spirit in which the OP is presentingthem is still valid and good. The premade engnes are a good start of the new people to get in to making a game. Not everyone can start coding their own engine just like that. And not everyone can make a game and grasp many of the notions that are involved. But everyone can learn and premade engines are a good way to learn in my opinion.
So unless some here have somethng to fear, i do not think that discouraging people from getting their feet wet with these engines which at 99$/year are a very affordable endeavor, is actually a good thing.
Many players have much better ideas than existing Devs (mainly due to constrtraints imposed on them by the industry), which these engines could help some to express without those constraints. It can only be good for the industry and I do not hink that there is anything to fear of.
I say anyone who ever wanted to put some of their Ideas to the test, go for it, pick one of these engines and let your creative juices guide you!
Order of the Silver Star, OSS
ESKA, Playing MMORPG's since Ultima Online 1997 - Order of the Silver Serpent, Atlantic Shard
Company Owner
MMO Interactive
Tell that to the people making The Repopulation.
The HeroEngine and the HeroCloud is the perfect solution for an indie company wanting to create an MMO or some other online game. Heroscript is the way for people using heroengine to code in new things or manipulate the engine in different ways.. its just a different scripting language.. UDK also uses their own scriping language as well as many other game engines. You can also gain access to the source code for the hero engine via other license models.
As for making an MMO yes your right its a lot of work but HeroEngine does cut down that work quite a bit.. work that you would have to do if you where gonig to use Unity3d..
Unity is a nice engine as well, now with DX11 support as well but it is in no way setup to support MMOs and you have to do a lot of work to get it even close to being ready for an MMO.. you will also need to use middleware for the networking code.
Most people put the hero engine down because of SWTOR.. Bioware used an old version of the engine and managed to mash it up bad as well..
At the end of the day HeroEngine is a very viable option for any indie company wanting to make an MMO. its also one of the best engines for multiple people working togeather, I have not seen it done better in any engine.
Saying that no one should try and make an MMO game as their first game, there is a shit ton of work invovled and a lot of things can go wrong.. best to make a few SP games and maybe a few small MP games first
Didnt realsie they had released HeroEngine 2 think ill have to take another look at it
Company Owner
MMO Interactive
Frame rate isn't just a function of the game engine. It depends tremendously on how much you're trying to keep track of and have to draw per frame, and on what you're trying to draw. The first time I ran my game engine, it ran at about 200 frames per second on my AMD E-350 based laptop/netbook, even though it was horribly unoptimized. It helped that the only thing it was trying to draw was a test pattern on the ground. Getting 50 frames per second while drawing 20 times as much means I've made huge improvements in efficiency, even though the frame rate went way down.
Now, you probably already knew that. But that's a point I was trying to make earlier in the thread, where someone was complaining that the Hero Engine is what forces SWTOR to limit how much it draws on the screen at once, as though some other game engine could draw arbitrarily large amounts of things without any performance problems. While there are surely some game engines that are more efficient than others, it's not an easy thing to measure, especially considering that the relevant comparison is after you've made all of your optimizations to each.
The trick is, there is only so much blood you can sqeeze from a turnip. Also, if you don't have access to the code for the engine, at that price, that is where people make optimizations.
Does DirectX 11 even matter if you're not using tessellation? And how could one plausibly hope to do tessellation without writing your own shaders? That's low-level stuff that an off-the-shelf game engine isn't going to give you access to without the full source code.
https://www.therepopulation.com - Sci Fi Sandbox.
There are plugins available for Unity3d that allow you to create your own shaders..
Check this webdemo of a some very nice terrain shaders.. i picked this up last night.
http://www.stobierski.pl/unity/Terrain_WebPlayer/WebPlayer.html
tho this is kind of getting away from the hero engine discussion, but you can also write your own shaders in HeroEngine 2 its one of the new features.
It doesn't matter if the number is made up. If you want to write your own engine, go for it. Almost everything I have ever read from developers about writing great 3D game engines from the ground up, is that it's a monumental undertaking. I'm really not sure what your point is here. You seem to believe that everyone is better off writing their own engine rather than licensing one, which is clearly *not true* for a lot of companies, especially indy developers who don't have the resources of a fully funded game company.
So where is your robust 3D MMO engine? I'd like to take a look at it since you fancy yourself an expert.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
Here's apparently what the Hero Engine says about doing shaders:
http://hewiki.heroengine.com/wiki/Shader
They start by saying there are two kinds of shaders. Well, there are two kinds of shaders that the Hero Engine will let you use. There are actually six kinds of shaders, but the Hero Engine won't let you touch hull, domain, geometry, or compute shaders. That's presumably simply because they're limited to DirectX 9.0c. But still, that means modern 3D graphics is off-limits.
I'm guessing that their list of "variables" allowed is the DirectX equivalent of OpenGL uniforms. If they're actually the equivalent of OpenGL variables, then egad, that's useless. But if they only allow certain ones--and artificially make a lot of types off-limits, then that seems awfully restrictive. I suppose that you could probably repurpose some for things that have nothing to do with the variable name, but that's something of a kludge and having variable names that have nothing to do with the meaning or purpose of the variable is rather than opposite of good coding practices.
As for the Unity Engine, here's what they have to say:
http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/Shaders.html
They still offer the basic vertex and fragment shaders, though I'm not sure what amount of customizability they give you there. They also offer surface shaders, which are supposed to be more customizable and allow tessellation. Here's what they say about surface shaders:
http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Components/SL-SurfaceShaderTessellation.html
They seem to focus mostly on how to compute the tessellation degree. In OpenGL, the work there would mostly be done in vertex shaders; I'm guessing that it's the same for DirectX.
They give examples, but not explicit, so I have no idea if you can do much with it. They compute the tessellation degree by calling a function without showing you the function, so I have no idea what the function does. They talk about making the tessellation depend on distance or edge length, but not curvature or boundary status, and you'll be completely crippled if you can't make it depend on those last two. Not being able to use curvature just means that you'll sometimes have to tessellate a lot more than necessary in some places in order to get adequate tessellation in others, which means your code will be poorly-optimized.
Having nothing at all about a boundary is far more problematic, as that means you can't attach tessellated surfaces to each other. That means you can't use tessellation to do anything complex unless you tessellate the whole thing in one go, which would be a nightmare to set up. That would make things much harder than necessary, which defeats the point of licensing a game engine. Well, the alternative is to just accept that you're going to have a lot of graphical artifacting when different surfaces tessellate a common boundary differently, but that's also undesirable.
I also don't see an explicit homeomorphism between the simplicial manifold with boundary given in the vertex data and the manifold with boundary that you're actually trying to draw. (Well, there's no hard rule that they have to be manifolds, but that will usually make your life easier.) It looks like they're relying on a texture for that, and the texture isn't explicitly given. For irregular shapes like faces, that's kind of what you have to do. But if you want to draw a more regular shape like a sphere or cylinder? You could create a texture for it, but it's wildly inefficient.
And again, if you want to attach surfaces to each other along their boundaries to create more complex shapes, details in how texture filtering works will probably give you graphical artifacting. That's not a problem with how texture filtering works; it's a problem of using it for things that it isn't meant for.
Modern Graphics are not an issue for most gamers, anything on Par with WoW graphics, or Elderscrolls Online graphics or SWTOR graphics is more than sufficient for an MMO.
Moderns, tesselations and the such, are good for Single Player games. I do not want to be upgrading Computer every time a new MMO comes out.
And you would be making the same mistake as all of the MMO's who advertised "next generation" MMO did, limitiong your player base, creating frustration for people, and bad word of mouth from the onset of launch.
MMO's do not need latest graphics to be great. If you bargaining card is your latst Graphics then I know intuitivelly as a player based on previous experiences that you have no substance or good gameplay in your game. Or at least I know that i will not be having fun because I will be fighting with the performance issues instead of enjoying the gameplay, which comes down to not having a good gameplay anyways from a player's perspective.
What I want in MMO is a good representation of things not a realistic representation of things as to strike a balance between Gameplay and Performance without me having to upgrade to the latest OS (I hear Microsoft wants to offer DirectX 11.1 only on Windows 8) or Gear...forget it, too much hassle for most players. And I am not about to turn my PC in ot a Smartphone either with Windows 8...no way.
Just jumping in to give a perspective.
Order of the Silver Star, OSS
ESKA, Playing MMORPG's since Ultima Online 1997 - Order of the Silver Serpent, Atlantic Shard
That's always going to happen when you fork the source code to customize things yourself. You change the way the game engine wants things structured to fit your game, and then any changes made to the "standard" version of the game engine assume the previous structure and don't fit your version of it. But you have to do it anyway unless you want the version you're using to be poorly optimized because the standard version can't customize things for every particular game.
you have to release your game to the public before you make this claim. no one expects a developer to criticise their own work publicly.
in terms of released games, hero engine doesnt really have a great history. no doubt it is easy to use, allows multiple people to work on the same thing at the same time in real time and has plenty of built in assets and networking but personally i would go about making an mmorpg using it. heck i wouldnt go about making an mmorpg as an indie unless it was something very simple (eg. 2d, turn based, text based or just plain simple)